Multiplex Fandango (25 page)

A girl lay against a snapped power line, foot long shards of broken glass jutting from her body in every direction.
Like the men who'd turned to watch the explosion, her eyes had smoldered and burned.

Itoro felt himself drawn to her.
Perhaps it was the way she leaned against the pole as if she were waiting for a ride.
Perhaps it was that she was so alone in death, only the shadows of her schoolmates to keep her company.
He wasn't sure what it was, but he staggered to her and fell to his knees.

He felt as if he needed to bear witness.
He wanted to see her face, but her head was bowed so low, her face was lost in shadow.
He reached towards her to lift her chin, but jerked away as a movement caught his eye.
A foot-long length of the girl's skin on her stomach seemed to move, undulating towards him.
He could see the ribbed texture of her abdominal muscles revealed by the flap of skin that hung across her lap, but it couldn't have moved.
There was no wind.
She was most certainly dead.
His mind was playing tricks on him.
He shook his head.
The skin hadn't moved.
The skin
couldn't
have moved.

Lifting her chin, he gazed at her.
She reminded him of his sister when she'd been little, her nose as small and delicate as a doll's.
Then something grabbed his wrist.
The skin of her stomach had him, stretched from where it hung by a mere inch of skin attached to her body.
It quivered as it strove to pull Itoro towards the girl.
He jerked
h
is arm and lurched to his feet, coming away with the length of skin, ripping it from the girl like flowers ripping free of a stem.
Holding his arm before him, he screamed.
The skin was somehow alive.
He watched as it crawled onto his arm and covered it.
Memories immediately invaded his mind.

...morning rice steaming from her mother's favorite pot.

...joy at finally understanding the math problem that had haunted her for a week.

...confusion about the shaking of the school, wondering if it was an earthquake or a volcano that caused the pictures to clatter, the books to fall and the vase holding a single white lily sitting atop Ms. Naruki's desk
to
smash to the floor.

Still screaming, Itoro peeled the skin away, using his left hand to claw and rend.
The effort caused him to stumble, his ankles twisting as his body spasmed, rejecting the very thought of the invasion.
More skin ripped free of the girl's body as if it sensed him and needed to be connected.
It began to creep towards him.
Ridding himself of the last residue of the girl, Itoro ran as fast and as far from the scene as he could, knowing that Ms. Naruki had been the little girl's teacher, and knowing that he'd never known that until the skin had imparted the knowledge.

Twenty minutes later he passed the police barracks.
Usually four rows of glistening white buildings, two had been destroyed and the others were fully engulfed.
To Itoro's surprise a fire brigade was busy fighting the fire, carrying buckets of water ran from the
Miyiku
River
to hurl onto the raging barracks.

Power lines along the river had burned so that only six feet of their once forty-foot lengths stood blackened and charred out of the scorched earth, looking like matchsticks sunk into the soil by a giant hand.
The stones of
Hiroshima
castle on the other side of the river were blackened like charcoal.
The tiered roofs had been swept away, five
hundred years of architectural mastery reduced to a smoldering fire
pit.
Everything was so tragic.
This was not how he remembered it.
Itoro's memories were clear.
He'd passed this point a thousand times and knew the area near the river to be one of the most beautiful sights.
Old women who'd once worked in the castle tended flowers and trees to make a ring of beauty around the harsh stones of
Hiroshima
Castle
.
After more than four hundred years of gardening, the result was spectacular, the beauty of some of the gardens bringing tears of joy and wonder to first-time visitors.

But no more.

Whatever foul thing had come to
Hiroshima
had not spared the gardens.
Itoro didn't know what saddened him the most, the loss of life, or the loss of the cultivated beauty.
It shamed him to compare the two, because part of being human meant that he valued humanity more than anything else.

A shout drew his attention.
One of the firemen had paused in his running, only to remove his mask and, with an expression of supreme horror, point back down the street the way Itoro had come.

A throng of two hundred marched up the street, the sound of their shuffling feet like angry whispers in a cave.
They held their hands and arms out and above them, their burns too painful to touch, clearly unwilling to allow their arms to come into contact with anything.
Like Armageddon zombies, they lurched along, vocal chords sizzled by the blast, unable to make any other sound except moans of pain.
Where they went, a trail of skin and blood traveled behind.
From pieces no larger than a hand to swathes of several feet, the skin crawled along the ground following the throng.

As Itoro watched, a piece of skin fell away from an elderly woman's arm.
The people behind her trampled it, but once it cleared the traffic, the skin lurched forward as if tugged by an invisible string.
Unwilling to be left behind, it followed, as if given the chance it would reattach itself and become whole once more.

A memory surfaced.
April on the shoulders of
Mount Fuji
when he and Myomi spent the whole hanami in silence.
They didn't need to speak to each other.
They felt a kinship through their touching fingers as they witnessed the snow falling along the cherry tree boughs, catching like blossoms and twinkling in cold air.
God how he'd loved her then.

Itoro spun and found a yard-long length of skin wrapped around his left leg.
He clawed at it, and with the help of his right foot, was able to pry it away.
He kicked it and stepped back.
When the skin hit the ground, it stilled for a moment, then came for him again.

Backpedaling, true fear
spiked
through him.
Fear of living, fear of pain, fear of fire, every fear paled in comparison to the fear of losing self.
He'd never thought he'd need to worry about it, but the unbidden memories terrified him.
Where was the dividing line between self and others?
In the train station it was that melted connection that separated everyone.
But what about memories?
How many of someone else's memories could a person have before they were no longer themselves and became that other person?
Was it the way a person looked that defined them, or who they were inside?

He'd never been to
Mount Fuji
.
He didn't know a woman named Myomi.
Whoever's memory that had been, Itoro had felt the bottomless chasm of love the man had possessed for the woman, and in feeling it, realized that the owner of the memory was dead and would most certainly never feel that way again...unless Itoro allowed the skin to become a part of him.

Once again he ran.

Past the fire brigade.

Past the ruined gardens.

Past the market where he'd bought flowers for Katsumi last week to commemorate their anniversary.

People lay dead and dying everywhere.
Occasionally he passed a man or woman staggering in the street, odd pieces of skin clinging desperately to them.
Itoro knew what that meant and shuddered at every iteration.
Did they even know who they were anymore?

He finally lost his breath only a half
-
mile from home.
He'd have to walk the rest of the way.
His legs ached almost as badly as his arms and back.
His cheek throbbed.
Drawing a hand to it, he realized for the first time that it would leave a scar.
How horrible would it look?
Would his face scare his son?
What of his wife?
He'd never been the handsomest man in
Hiroshima
, but he was de
lighted that Katsumi seemed to think so.
Would she still love him with such a scar as this would leave?

The sound of a song caught him, bringing memories of his youth past the horrible clarity of the present.
It was a
warabe-uta
known as
Tōryanse
, a childr
en's song he'd sung as a young boy.
More than a song, it was also a game.
He and a friend would hold their arms together and sing the song while others walked between them.
The person who walked through at the song's end was caught.

The words came crystal clear in the ruined air.

Tōryanse, tōryanse

Koko wa doko no hosomichi ja?

Tenjin-sama no hosomichi ja

Chotto tōshite kudashanse

Goyō no nai mono tōshasenu

He followed the sound through the smoke and destruction until he spied a woman standing in the middle of
Miyuki
Bridge
.
From
a distance she looked like a courtesan pausing to gaze at the carp before continuing across to the other side.
She held a red paper umbrella to keep the rain from wetting her coifed hair.
Her body hugged her kimono.
Cranes dipped and swooped through the pattern of the material.

The water of
Miyuki
River
was black with soot.
Bodies bobbed along like flotsam.
One turned in the water, the face coming into view.
He knew this one.
She'd sold him fish on Thursdays.
She'd always had a sweet smile, all the more sweeter for her youth.
The image should have shocked, but the song soothed him as the woman sung it over and over.
She started it again.

His mother had sung it to him as a child.
His wife had sung it to his son.
He'd sung it as a child, the meaning wrapped in the mortality and the achievements of life.
But why was this strange ephemeral woman singing this song?
What did it mean?
Itoro had read and heard about phantom visitations since he was a child.
Could this be one of them?
Perhaps it was
Amaterasu, the beautiful goddess of the sun, come to the darkness of
Hiroshima
to bear witness and see the devastation before she'd once again shine her healing rays upon the city.
Perhaps she'd appeal to her brothers, Susanowa and Tsuki-yomi, who shared the power of governing the universe and ask them if they'd avenge the murder of
Hiroshima
.

Itoro quickened his step and hurried towards the bridge.
But the closer he got, the more different she looked.
What he'd taken for a crane pattern kimono seemed strangely misshapen, her body completely filling out the fabric.
Tears dripped from her eyes as she stared at the bodies.
Black rain sluiced off her umbrella.
Her bare feet were mangled and broken.
And then he saw it and realized why her kimono looked so strange as it undulated, an edge folding against her skin, tighter, becoming her.

It never was a kimono.
The cranes had the quality of line art created by a master tattoo artist.
They indeed swooped and dived, each carrying a spark of life from their creator.
But they hadn't been drawn on fabric, but on skin, and what was wrapped around the woman had never belonged to her.
Instead, it had probably belonged to a yakuza or some gambler whose largess had always been destined to become the garb for this phantom goddess at the end of the world.

Knowing the nature of the skins, Itoro could only guess that she hadn't been fast enough to outrun it.

And her tears?

Were they falling because of what she gazed upon or was it because she'd lost herself, becoming someone she'd never even known existed before?
Even now she was stuck in the loop of the song, singing the verse over and over; more the tragic, her haunting voice filled him with its beauty.

Then he noticed a power line that had somehow survived the devastation across from the river.
Birds hung from the line, or rather skin hung like birds.
And as he watched, several disengaged themselves, took flight and headed towards him.
With the
Tōryanse
in his ears and his heart in his throat, he somehow found the strength to run the little way he still had to go.
Reaching down, he grasped a piece of metal and began to swing it at the skin-birds as they sought to land on him.